Parole can't find the correct proportion for many videos

[Leonardo Müller]

I'm doing the post-install test of Xubuntu Cosmic Daily and I've noticed that, on many videos, Parole is unable to find their correct proportions, playing them with the proportion of the last video it found the proportion or a square, if none was found.

It's unable to find the proportion for:

Most FLV files encoded with H264 (for one it strangely found, it's the only one with a yuv444 color space);
MP4 files encoded with H264;
WebM files encoded with VP8 or VP9;
MKV files encoded with H264, VP8 or VP9.

It was able to find the proportion for:

WMV files encoded with WMV1.

From my tests, I can tell there is a correlation between the files Thunar can show thumbnails and the files Parole is able to find the proportion: if Thunar can show the thumbnail, the proportion of the video is correct. If Thunar can't show the thumbnail, Parole can't find the proportion.

This bug is particularly relevant because H264, VP8 and VP9 are common codecs.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.10
Package: parole 1.0.1-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-23.25-generic 4.15.18
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-23-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.10-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: XFCE
Date: Thu Jun 21 21:26:46 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-06-21 (0 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" - Alpha amd64 (20180619)
SourcePackage: parole
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1778153

[Theo Linkspfeifer (lastonestanding)]

Is this still the case when testing the latest Xubuntu Daily ISO?

This may be (or have been) an issue in GStreamer which is used by both Parole and Tumbler (Xfce's thumbnail generator).

[Leonardo Müller (leozinho29-eu)]

I just tested this, and all videos I tested are being shown with the correct proportions now. And Thunar was able to show thumbnails to all videos unless WMV videos.

After install gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly the WMV videos had thumbnails and worked properly, with their proportions right.

NOTE: the Parole window that asks to install the codecs did not work, I had to install the package gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly manually with apt.

To me looks like this problem is fixed now.

[Theo Linkspfeifer (lastonestanding)]

Thanks for the quick reply.

So, this was indeed a bug in the GStreamer backend which got fixed. Regarding the codec installation, that issue is discussed here:

https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14529